Escape To The Countryside

The philosophy of retiring to a country home for a spill has changed its meaning. As more homes turn into prosaic hotels, Anand Kapoor fi nds that long-lost experience at Belmond Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons.

- Anand Kapoor

Since I can remember, the concept of a weekend away at a friend’s house in the country has had immense charm—the romanticism of arriving by train, passing rolling hills and trickling brooks to eventually be collected and ensconced in a private estate, sheltered from the realities of the outside world. Along the way, this was reinforced by films such as Brideshead Revisited and Peter’s Friends but the reality of a stately escape was not so easy to realise. The irony of it all was that I actually lived in the country so a weekend away to the country seemed a little pointless.

Escaping the madness of the city has historically been seen as derigueur. But with the availability of cheap travel, visiting the country fell out of fashion; however, luckily for an old romantic, this seems to be changing and country sojourns are once again trending.

If you want to truly experience the traditional country escape, you need a friend with a stately home—think Downton Abbey. Nowadays, most of these places are unviable to run as homes and are fast getting converted into cookie-cutter hotels with a veneer of history to make them respectable. So discovering a place that doesn’t feel like a hotel but more like a friend’s retreat is nigh on impossible, I thought.

Then to my delight, we discovered the much talked-about Belmond Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons outside Oxford this summer. Exiting the motorway for Oxford City Centre always feels slightly anticlimactic as you pass row upon row of unassuming and uninspiring houses. As you get closer to Oxford, the architecture begins to hint at the cornucopia of styles that stamp their personality onto the city. The mishmash of periods is what gives Oxford its charm.